Optical switches typically are implemented for routing optical signals through an optical network such as the optical fiber infrastructure deployed in metropolitan, regional, national, or international areas. Conventional optical transmission and switching is performed in an optical network using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). Optical switching in a WDM-based network uses optical-to-electrical-to-optical (OEO) conversion, in which an optical switch receives an optical signal, converts the optical signal to an electrical (digital) signal, determines routing information based on the digital signal, and converts the electrical signal back to an optical signal for subsequent transmission. Optical switches that use OEO conversion consume a significant amount of energy to perform the conversion and require a significant amount of time, which increases latency and leads to electronic bottlenecks. One alternative is optical packet switching (OPS) that allows an optical switch to route an input optical packet to an optical output port without converting the entire packet into an electrical/digital signal. In some cases, an optical header is converted into a digital signal that includes information used to configure the optical switch to route an optical payload without converting the optical payload into an electrical/digital signal. An OPS node is typically smaller in size and has reduced energy consumption relative to implementing corresponding functionality in OEO-based node. The OPS nodes perform traffic grooming to combine small optical flows into larger units that are processed as a single optical flow, as well as having better bandwidth usage than reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) switches because the packet switching ability of the OPS node supports time division multiplexing.